Analysis: Follow-up stories

The two respective stories are from Pioneer Press. The first story can be found here. The follow-up story can be found here.

In the first story's lead, the author wrote that the Maplewood police were looking for a man possibly connected with the death of an unidentified woman. The second story's lead identifies the stabbing victim as 16-year-old Anna Lynn Hurd of North St. Paul. The two stories were written by separate reporters, which I thought was strange.

The first story was quite short and it stuck to the facts of what the reporter was told by the police at the time. The second story, however, described the attack in more detail, stating that Hurd was stabbed several times by the unknown suspect.

The first story noted that the police were looking for a male who might have been involved with the death, but the follow-up story notifies readers that the police said the person of interest described earlier is no longer in question and they do not call him a suspect.

The Pioneer Press did a good job of following up on this story with more details and facts, but I think it would have been stronger if the first author wrote the follow-up story because he probably knew the background information and he was already in contact with the police officer cited in the two articles.